Observation of a Majorana zero mode in a topologically protected edge channel

Jäck, Berthold; Xie, Yonglong; Li, Jian; Jeon, Sangjun; Bernevig, B. Andrei; Yazdani, Ali

doi:10.1126/science.aax1444

Cited by 189 publications

(158 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Up to now, various proposals have been made to engineer TSCs by combining conventional materials, [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and great progress has been made towards revealing the signatures of MZMs. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] However, direct experimental tunneling data showing that MZMs appear simultaneously in pairs is still missing, [28][29][30] even though indirect evidence of the spatial dependence of the overlap between two MZM's have been reported. 17 Our paper provides the tunneling data that directly confirm the key property of MZM, i.e.…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signature of a pair of Majorana zero modes in superconducting gold surface states

Manna

Peng

Xie

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

144

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Under certain conditions, a fermion in a superconductor can separate in space into two parts known as Majorana zero modes, which are immune to decoherence from local noise sources and are attractive building blocks for quantum computers. Promising experimental progress has been made to demonstrate Majorana zero modes in materials with strong spin-orbit coupling proximity coupled to superconductors. Here we show direct evidence of the split Majorana pair in a new material platform utilizing the two-dimensional surface states of gold, which is intrinsically scalable for building the complex nanowire circuits for topological qubits. Using scanning tunneling microscope to probe EuS islands grown on top of gold nanowires, we confirm the Majorana pair by demonstrating two spatially well separated zero bias tunneling conductance peaks aligned along the direction of the applied magnetic

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Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signature of a pair of Majorana zero modes in superconducting gold surface states

Manna

Peng

Xie

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

144

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“…Implementations of MBSs were first proposed in quantum field theory by Jackiw and Rossi . Condensed matter realizations were proposed by Read and Green in 2000 within the Quantum Hall phase, by Kitaev in 2001 in p‐wave superconductors, and others, with several recent experimental confirmations . MBSs have been studied as possible building blocks of fault‐tolerant quantum computers, and are the subject of intense research currently …”

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confidence: 99%

Mechanical Analogue of a Majorana Bound State

et al. 2019

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The discovery of topologically nontrivial electronic systems has opened a new age in condensed matter research. From topological insulators to topological superconductors and Weyl semimetals, it is now understood that some of the most remarkable and robust phases in electronic systems (e.g., quantum Hall or anomalous quantum Hall) are the result of topological protection. These powerful ideas have recently begun to be explored also in bosonic systems. Topologically protected acoustic, mechanical, and optical edge states have been demonstrated in a number of systems that recreate the requisite topological conditions. Such states that propagate without backscattering could find important applications in communications and energy technologies. Here, a topologically bound mechanical state, a different class of nonpropagating protected state that cannot be destroyed by local perturbations, is demonstrated. It is in particular a mechanical analogue of the well‐known Majorana bound states (MBSs) of electronic topological superconductor systems. The topological binding is implemented by creating a Kekulé distortion vortex on a 2D mechanical honeycomb superlattice that can be mapped to a magnetic flux vortex in a topological superconductor.

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“…It is worth noting that such a question is quite timely as recently the electronic material candidates for SOTIs, both in two dimensions (2D) and three dimensions (3D), are growing [57][58][59][60][61][62][63]. Moreover, signature of MZM has also been observed in a heterostructure which consists of a bismuth thin film (a SOTI with TRS[57]), a conventional s-wave SC, and magnetic iron clusters [64].In this work, we consider SOTIs without TRS and investigate SOTI/SC heterostructures in both 2D and 3D. Remarkably, we find that such heterostructures provide natural realizations of second-order topological superconductors (SOTSCs) which host MCMs in 2D and CMHMs in 3D.…”

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confidence: 99%

Majorana corner and hinge modes in second-order topological insulator/superconductor heterostructures

Yan

2019

Phys. Rev. B

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As platforms of Majorana modes, topological insulator (quantum anomalous Hall insulator)/superconductor (SC) heterostructures have attracted tremendous attention over the past decade. Here we substitute the topological insulator by its higher-order counterparts. Concretely, we consider second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) without time-reversal symmetry and investigate SOTI/SC heterostructures in both two and three dimensions. Remarkably, we find that such novel heterostructures provide natural realizations of second-order topological superconductors (SOTSCs) which host Majorana corner modes in two dimensions and chiral Majorana hinge modes in three dimensions. As here the realization of SOTSCs requires neither special pairings nor magnetic fields, such SOTI/SC heterostructures are outstanding platforms of Majorana modes and may have wide applications in future.Over the past decade, topological superconductors (TSCs) have attracted continuous and tremendous attention[1-9]. Among various TSCs, one-dimensional (1d) and twodimensional (2d) TSCs without time-reversal symmetry (TRS) have attracted particular interest as they harbor Majorana zero modes (MZMs) at their boundaries[10-12] and in the cores of vortices [13][14][15][16], respectively. Owing to their fractional nature, MZMs are ideal candidates to construct nonlocal qubits immune to local decoherence[10]. Moreover, owing to their non-Abelian statistics [17], their braiding operations are found to realize elementary quantum gates. Thus, MZMs are believed to be building blocks of topological quantum computation [18] and have been actively sought in experiments [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29].As is known, odd-parity superconductors (SCs) provide natural realizations of TSCs, however, they are unfortunately rare in nature. In a seminal paper [14], Fu and Kane pointed out that topological insulator (TI)/SC heterostructures provide an effective realization of odd-parity superconductivity. Accordingly, in the presence of magnetic field, vortices emerging in such heterostructures are found to carry MZMs. In a later influential paper[30], Qi et al pointed out that quantum anomalous Hall insulator (QAHI)/SC heterostructures provide a simple realization of 2d chiral TSCs which harbor not only vortex-core MZMs, but also chiral Majorana edge modes. These two theoretical works have triggered a lot of experimental works on TI(QAHI)/SC heterostructures [28,29,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41], and remarkable progress in detecting vortex-core MZMs has been witnessed in recent years [28,29,40,41].Very recently, TIs and TSCs have been generalized to include their higher-order counterparts [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Importantly, higher-order TIs (HOTIs) and TSCs (HOTSCs) have extended the conventional bulk-boundary correspondence. Accordingly, an n-th order TI or TSC in d dimensions host (d − n)dimensional boundary modes. For instance, a second-order TI (SOTI) in 2d and 3d host zero-dimensional (0d) corner modes an...

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Observation of a Majorana zero mode in a topologically protected edge channel

Cited by 189 publications

References 52 publications

Signature of a pair of Majorana zero modes in superconducting gold surface states

Signature of a pair of Majorana zero modes in superconducting gold surface states

Mechanical Analogue of a Majorana Bound State

Majorana corner and hinge modes in second-order topological insulator/superconductor heterostructures

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